Effect of Probiotics on Host-Microbial Crosstalk: A Review on Strategies to Combat Diversified Strain of Coronavirus

The scare of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), does not seem to fade away, while there is a constant emergence of novel deadly variants including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron. Until now, it has claimed approximately 276,436,619 infections, and the number of deaths surpluses to 5,374,744 all over the world. While saving the life has been a priority during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the post-infection healing and getting back to normalcy has been undermined. Improving general health conditions and immunity with nutritional adequacy is currently of precedence for the government as well as frontline health workers to prevent and assuage infections. Exploring the role of probiotics and prebiotics in managing the after-effects of a viral outbreak could be of great significance, considering the emergence of new variants every now and then. To enhance human immunity, the recent evidence on the connection between gut microbiota and the broad spectrum of the clinical COVID-19 disease is the reason to look at the benefits of probiotics in improving health conditions. This review aims to sketch out the prospective role of probiotics and prebiotics in improving the standard of health in common people

In silico design of PHA synthase and its validation by PHAs producing bacterial isolates

Biopolymers are important alternatives to the petroleum-based plastics due to environment friendly manufacturing processes, biodegradability and biocompatibility. Therefore use of novel biopolymers such as polylactide, polysaccharides, aliphatic polyesters and polyhydroxyalkonoates (PHAs) is of interest. PHAs are biodegradable polyesters of hydroxyalkanoates (HA) produced from renewable resources by using microorganisms as intracellular carbon and energy storage compounds.  Even though PHAs are promising candidate for biodegradable polymers, however, the production cost limits their application on an industrial scale. Therefore an attempt was made to model different PHAs synthases which are the key enzyme in the biosynthesis of Polyhydroxyalkanoates as the structural information of this enzyme is in dark veil.Then molecular docking  of class I  PHA  Synthase from Ralstonia Eutrophia was done to study the PHA synthase activity. As there are lots of strain which needs to explore for the production of PHA. This investigation leads to find out the most industrial applicable microbes. Few bacterial isolates from soil sample were screened for production of PHA followed by the validation of the enzymatic activity and its product characterization to understand its structural properties

Comprehensive sequence and structure analysis of algal lipid catabolic enzyme Triacylglycerol lipase:an in silico study to vitalize the development of optimum engineered strains with high lipid productivity

Microalgae as an alternative renewable resource for biofuel production have captured much significance. Nonetheless, its economic viability is a field of major concern for researchers. Unraveling the lipid catabolic pathway and gaining insights into the sequence-structural features of its primary functioning enzyme, Triacylglycerol lipase, will impart valuable information to target microalgae for augmented lipid content. In the present study, a genome-wide comparative study on putative Triacylglycerol lipase (TAGL) enzyme from algal species belonging to varied phylogenetic lineages was performed. The comprehensive sequence analysis revealed that TAGL comprises of three distinct conserved domains, such as, Patatin, Class III Lipase, and Abhydro_lipase, and also confirmed the ubiquitous presence of GXSXG motif in the sequences analyzed. In the absence of a crystal structure of algal TAGL till date, we developed the first 3D model of patatin domain of TAGL from an oleaginous microalga, Phaedactylum tricornutum, employing homology modeling, docking and molecular dynamic simulations methods. The domain-substrate complex having the low-ranking docking score revealed the binding of palmitic acid to the TAGL patatin domain surface with strong hydrogen bond interactions. The simulation results implied that the substrate-complexed patatin domain and the free enzyme adopted a more stable conformation after 40 ns. This is the first ever attempt to provide in-silico insights into the structural and dynamical insights on catalytic mechanism of the TAGL patatin domain. Subsequently, these findings aided our understanding on their structural stability, folding mechanism and protein-substrate interactions, which could be further utilized to design site-specific mutagenic experiments for engineering microalgal strains. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma</p